Did Jupiter Initiate All Life On Earth? (light, Sun, theory)

[Six Foot Three]

This is gonna be kinda heavy ......but i wanted to post this as i watched a show on the Discovery Channel yesturday about our moon and they were asking the top astronomers as to where all the meteor craters over the moon came from. One of the top scientists stated that these happened mainly all at once around 3.8 billion years because of the planet Jupiter had a major shift in it's magnetic polar caps and this flung hundreds of thousands of asteroids inside the asteroid belt between Saturn and Jupiter in all directions in the Solar System which included hitting the moon and the earth.

So when the asteroids which are made of iron slammed into earth's oceans at 2,000 mph which were mainly nitrogen and carbon this violent chemical reaction caused the creation of amino acids that are the basic building blocks for all organic matter on earth. They simulated this experiment using the same components of nitrogen, carbon, iron at the levels at 3.8 billion years back and smashed it at 2,000 mph in the special machine and created all the essential amino acids.

If this theory is correct it only happened on earth and not the moon or other planets because of these components at those specific levels only exist on this planet do to our oceans.

Anyway after watching that i came away with a ''wow'' moment to think that Jupiter initiated the process of flinging asteroids towards earth which possibly created the earlist forms of life on earth.

[Bull Winkus]

Are you sure that wasn't The History Channel's "How The Earth Was Made" that you saw?

How the Earth Was Made

I watched most of it, but my DVR is acting up. I don't remember seeing anything about Jupiter.

I'm only a novice, but I don't think a shift in magnetic poles would send astroids flinging in all directions. The magnetosphere has nothing to do with gravity, mass and inertia which is what holds rocks, both large and small in their orbits. It has a lot to do with protecting life from cosmic rays, though.

The early solar system was an accretion disc, not unlike the one in this link.

Magnetic field of FU Orionis

There had to be lots of chaotic interaction over the millions of years during that period, it is quite probable that iron astroids would have struck the Earth by the thousands regardless of any interaction with Jupiter, but Jupiter may have played a role in any case.

[Six Foot Three]

Sorry Bull Winkus and others as i mean't to say the National Geographic channel show ''Direct from the Moon''. I hope they show it again as i'll really focus on as that segment as i wasn't expecting to hear that about a show of the moon.

Of course it's all theory but it was interesting along with the film footage 3-D in HD ever of the moon from the Japanese Kaguna Lunar orbiter.

Expedition Week | Direct from the Moon | National Geographic Channel (http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/expedition-week/4058/Overview - broken link)

[garisonthebull]

Well it had potential to work on Earth because of our oceans atmosphere and magnetosphere. It did not occurr on the moon because it has none of these. As far as Mars it had water but not very much it had and atmosphere but its magnetosphere is dead and is always under bombarding radiation. Venus has many of these but it too has a dead magnetosphere and it is starved for sunlight in its heavy clouds it could make up for sunlight with volcanism energy but would still have issues with it extreme high temps and crushing atmosphere.

Did Jupiter do it though? It is a great theory. 3.8 Billion years ago Jupiter did have a small shift in its orbital path around the sun and with its super mass it could have and probably did send the asteriod belt into disarray. But here Is the issue that I have there is some evidence that microbial life had begun on Earth as many as four billion years ago. Placing the time line 200,000,000 years prior to the Jupiter event. The 4 billion year evidence is somewhat inconclusive. So as for me I do not exactly know. I would say that it is a theory well worth further research and that open minds will always seek truths. Until conclusive evidence manifests we should take in many possabilities.

[jabm67]

It's almost impossible to make any statements about Venus's evolution. The whole surface of the planet was "repaved" in a volcanic episode 750 - 800 million years back. There are no features left from before then. I have read interesting speculations that Venus could even have been earthlike before that time, but the slow (but inexorable) increase in the luminosity of the Sun warmed the surface to the point that the liquid water on the surface all went to vapor (the temperature got over 100 C), which caused a series of events (the thin oceanic crust was no linger being held down and cooled by 3-km-deep water) that caused volcanism to break out over more or less the entire surface at once.

If true, that process will happen here on Earth in about a billion years. (It's worth pointing out that's a long time; multicellular organisms have existed for only about 700 million years.)